High speed reprographic systems are well known and in common use throughout the business world. These systems contain many complex components which must work together to produce the desired output documents from the input source. These components can include digital front ends that accept electronic input and generate page images; a printing engine that accepts these page images and marks them on appropriate media; and one or more finishing devices that may fold, collate, staple or bind the pages together to make the final documents. Conventional control systems coordinate the operation of these separate components to ensure efficient usage of the machinery.
For example, conventional systems, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,461,469 and published US Patent Application US 2001/0055123A1, show an apparatus for programming and coordinating the task of assembling a complex document from its individual components, each of which may be produced by a separate machine, and are then further combined in a finishing apparatus. The entire contents of U.S. Pat. No. 5,461,469 and published US Patent Application US 2001/0055123A1 are hereby incorporated by reference.
However, conventional systems are aimed at coordinating and optimizing the assembly of the final document and not necessarily with the optimum usage of each individual component of the system. Very often, in reprographic engines that are part of a larger document preparation system, the details of optimum usage of the printing engine are often subsumed under the goal of properly assembling the complex document and ensuring that the proper work flow is followed.
Since the cost of complex document preparation systems is quite high, the goal of maximizing the throughput of the overall system has cost advantages to its users. To fully realize this throughput goal, it is necessary to not only optimize the interactions and flow between the individual elements of the document preparation system, but to also to optimize as much as possible the throughput of each individual component of the system. In order to do this one must know the precise details of the internal operation of the machine in question.
There are often cases in which the operator of a machine may not even be aware of inefficiencies that may arise when choosing certain options. In some cases, especially where the job is small, the overhead of alerting the operator of the inefficiency and suggesting a change may consume more time than simply executing the job. However, in many cases this is not true. In this case it would be desirable for the overall production system to be able to modify its setup instructions to better produce the job. However such a change may require other operator interventions, for example to load different paper stock to route the printing or finishing to a different machine than originally planned.
Even if the reprographic engine is operated as a stand-alone machine, the ability to optimize the setup of the machine can result in increased throughput which can result in economically significant savings.
In order to effectively use a printing engine, one must understand all of the details of its internal operation and the interactions between the various internal components.
For example, in many high speed printing engines, the internal operations are all keyed to the cycle of the photoreceptor. It is not reasonable to expect that an operator of such a machine to be knowledgeable at that level of detail.
It is therefore useful to provide a system that can automatically compute the optimum setup of a printing engine based on the detailed characteristics of the engine.
It is further desirable that such a system could also be programmed to have a library of common jobs associated with the machine so that it could more rapidly and automatically program itself.
A further desirable characteristic of such a compensation system is that it should make some estimate of the savings in time and effort involved in changing from an operator selected setup to an optimum one, and if the savings is below some threshold level, to forgo changing the setup or even notifying the operator, thereby avoiding changes that yield only a small benefit and where the effort involved in making the change is larger than the savings.
An aspect of such a compensation system would include a computational element that, given the input and output paper path options: compute the optimum time needed to produce the job, the extra time needed to produce the job, given the chosen setup, and a way to inform the operator of the system of any excess time needed.
A further aspect of such a compensation system would include inform the operator of the time penalty only if it exceeded some predetermined threshold.
A further aspect of such a compensation system would inform the operator of the system via the user interface.
A further aspect of such a compensation system would communicate the time penalty via an external communication interface, if that was the means of programming the job.
A further aspect of such a compensation system would be to use lookup tables based on the input and output configurations to simplify the logic and computation of the times involved.